The Legalized Marijuana Movement – Nudging the Snowflake that Started the Avalanche

#3 is of special interest for educators. He breaks it down into some useful ways:

People in the U.S. are consuming information 11.8 hours every day, and they are doing it in many different ways:

Photo Literacy – Currently over 250 million photos are uploaded onto Facebook every day. Video Literacy – Google recently announced that videos are being uploaded to YouTube at a rate of 48 hours of video every minute. Coding Literacy – With over 8,000 coding languages currently in existence and new ones coming into play faster than old ones are going away, people who are “code literate” are in huge demand. Game Literacy – The video game industry is expected to grow from $67 billion in 2012 to $82 billion in 2017 with game playing in 70% of all households. App Literacy – Between Apple and Android, over 1.5 million apps are currently in existence and this number is climbing rapidly. Device Literacy – The “Internet of Things” is growing exponentially, and Cisco estimates the number of devices connected to the Internet by 2020 hit 50 billion. Social Media Literacy – One out of every five pageviews on the web is on Facebook. With over 1 billion registered users, Facebook is leading the pack, but there are many other brands of social media like Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, and LinkedIn nipping at their heals. In addition to the ones listed above are streaming music, podcasts, audio books, movies, courseware, and many more.

On the one hand this recalls classic information literacy arguments. On the other, it’s so broad as to mean “communication” rather than literacy.

Here is a fun article looking back at predictions made in the pages of Scientific American, over the past century+.

I’m charmed by this one:

The car of the future will have no such thing as a “driver’s seat.” All the seats in the car save the rear one will be moveable. Driving will be done from a small control board, which can be held in the lap. It will be connected to the mechanism by a flexible electric cable. A small finger lever, not a wheel, will guide the car. [January 5, 1918]

Longer version: Cathy O’Neil notes that Silver blames the 2008 financial crash on bad modeling… but not on corruption, or unethical business practices.

We didn’t have a financial crisis because of a bad model or a few bad models. We had bad models because of a corrupt and criminally fraudulent financial system.

That’s an important distinction, because we could fix a few bad models with a few good mathematicians, but we can’t fix the entire system so easily. There’s no math band-aid that will cure these boo-boos.

Similarly, in regards to bad modeling in medical research,

flaws in these medical models will be hard to combat, because they advance the interests of the insiders: competition among academic researchers to publish and get tenure is fierce, and there are enormous financial incentives for pharmaceutical companies.

I haven’t gotten to either of those chapters in Silver’s book yet, but yikes! What blinders.

It begins by identifying a set of drivers, or “Megatrends”. These include: increased individual empowerment; diffusion of global power (decline of US unipolarity); certain demographics (some countries age extensively, while there are also , “a still-significant but shrinking number of youthful societies and states”; growing urbanization; a potential resource crisis (the “food, water, and energy nexus”).

The authors also mention a bunch of “game changers”, problems which could also warp things: governance problems, economic fragility, rise of conflict, regional instability, new technology.

Using these drivers and selected game changers, the report presents four scenarios.

Stalled Engines. The bad one: “Under this scenario, the eurozone unravels quickly, causing Europe to be mired in recession. The US energy revolution fails to materialize, dimming prospects for an economic recovery… global economic growth falters and all players do relatively poorly”.

Fusion, the happiest, in some ways: “With the growing collaboration among the major powers, global multilateral institutions are reformed and made more inclusive. In this scenario, all boats rise substantially.”

Gini Out-of-the-Bottle. That’s “Gini” as in the famous inequality coefficient. Economic inequality booms, and “the lack of societal cohesion domestically is mirrored at the international level. Major powers are at odds; the potential for conficts rises. More countries fail, fueled in part by the dearth of international cooperation on assistance and development. In sum, the world is reasonably wealthy,but it is less secure as the dark side of globalizationposes an increasing challenge in domestic and international politics”.

Nonstate World. The decline of states and their replacement: “Formal governance institutions that do not adapt to the more diverse and widespread distribution of power are also less likely to be successful. Multinational businesses, IT communications firms, international scientists, NGOs,and others that are used to cooperating across borders and as part of networks thrive in this hyper-globalized world where expertise, influence, and agility count for more than “weight” or “position.””.

In comparing US outcomes, the team offered this intriguing view of what national GDP might look like as a proportion of global output. Note which scenario is best for that condition:

Also in this project: a nice set of black swans, and a group blog for surfacing ideas..